What are your best tips for a beginning treasure hunter?

Keeping your sweep even and close to the ground is a good first pointer.I overlap each sweep with the previous one. Clothes Lines, or where they used to exist, are good places to find the good stuff. Old maps from the engineers office could shed light on which houses are the oldest standing,no longer standing,where clothes lines,burnpis,shed were located, etc. Allways get written permission to hunt. Cut horshoe shaped holes when digging to leave the roots intact enough to keep from creating yellow patches. Pack out all of your trash and treasure. Do not discard Hunters crap you dug up. Recheck your hunting grounds twice and thrice on different settings (I found a 100 lb roll of clean copper wire this way recently, on my third try over an area that was giving me wierd signals). It was 10-12 inches in the ground. Save all of your items and seperate them into containers. Even hunt old iron. Salvage your items like copper,aluminum.brass,etc in quantity. I have made 3 times the value of my detector in 2 years and hardly detect but a few dozen times a year. Old farms and barnyards are excellent locations to make an easy 100$ or more per outting using all settings. A recent farm I did netted close to $150 is steel scraps burried in the ground around the base of the barn. Never lose hope, be thourough, and have fun.

Most metal detectors have a deciminator on them, but if you are out in the eastern part of Washington state, around all that lava rock, I see your problem. I have been there and it is very touchy stuff. If you can find old farm houses and such, remember all the places people use to bury their money(didn't trust banks). Often, they would bury their money around chicken houses, as chickens and critters make good burglar alarms, if anyone came snooping.